Pretending to Live
by Exceeds Expectations
Summary: "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ― Oscar Wilde. 50 characters, 50 drabbles. For the Character Diversity Boot Camp Challenge.
1. Molly II

**A/N:** Hello, dear reader! This is the first of what will be a 50-fic drabble collection for owluvr's Character Diversity Boot Camp Challenge. Each fic will feature a different character, without any repetition, and will be based on a list of prompts. Please review! And feel free to suggest characters! God knows there's too many to count.

**Prompt: **2. Facade

**Character: **Molly Weasley II

* * *

Teddy has always seen her differently to other people.

They see big, brown eyes and softened, rounded features and a coppery mess that she cannot tame, but he sees something that's not quite her and something that is so utterly and entirely her that she's given up hiding. He sees the strength in her eyes and the sharp jut of bones set in determination, and the lips that tell him she's happy he's here. (And they always do.) He sees the secrets she's keeping and the dreams she's ignoring and even the lies she's chanting to herself. She pretends she doesn't want him to see, but he sees that too.

Molly no longer wears makeup or falsifies herself when she's around him because he knows it and she knows it and it's all a bit ridiculous.

He thinks he loves her even before she has managed to tease her hair into curls and before she has slicked her lips a shade of pink that makes him think of little girls and stereotypes. He tells her she's perfect before she has plucked and waxed and shaped and before she has blackened her eyelashes and coloured her eyelids and even before she has covered every imperfection on her body with silk and cotton.

He's the only one so far who has managed to peel back her skin without touching her. He's the only one so far who has cared enough to find the voice hidden in the shadows of this facade. He is the only one who she can let in.

And when he finally kisses her it feels like coming home.


	2. Lucy

**A/N: **Drabbles are fun! Although writing deaf!Lucy was strange.

**Character:** Lucy Weasley (They won't all be Weasleys, I promise!)

**Prompt: **19. Writing

* * *

Lucy watches Mummy's lips form words she'll never hear and pulls from them a story.

It's a nice story; a story about love. She loves reading about love. It makes her happy. When Mummy holds her close and puts her lips to her forehead, she can feel her mouth "I love you" against her skin and that makes her happiest of all.

In the night time, when the darkness is as black as her perpetual silence, Lucy reaches for small paperbacks and hits at her lamp with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, until the insides of her eyelids glow a faint orange and she knows it is bright. She curls up, reading words of love (words that will never fall perfectly from her lips, words caught beneath her clumsy tongue) and falls asleep before morning comes.

* * *

She grows up and grows older and her silent world falls home to letters and words. She picks up a pen and writes how the world looks when you're only looking with your eyes. She has nothing to compare it to and so her words are less observational and more poetic.

She waxes lyrical about the beauty of movement, the colour of happiness, the taste of rainwater when you least expect it, the vibrations in her throat when she sighs.

She builds herself a home in her poetry, and when Lucy finally meets _that boy_, the one she thinks she'll spend forever with, the only way she can tell him is with her words.

So she finds a scrap of a paper and a slowly failing pen, and she writes his name a hundred times and tells him that's how she feels.


	3. Lysander

**A/N: **For Shira Lansys' Word Count Drabble Challenge!

**Prompt: **3. Suitcase

**Character: **Lysander Scamander

* * *

You pack up in a whirl of flying jumpers and soaring books, and you stand there and watch sadly as your entire life fits itself into one little suitcase. You sigh.

And then you take everything you own and walk out of the castle and never look back.

You spend the next four years living out of that suitcase, searching for the creatures your mother murmured about as she held you close to her chest. You trade books for secrets in Egypt and swap your jumpers for t-shirts in Brazil.

Maybe it's not so sad that you can fit your life into one little bag.

Maybe that's the way to be free.


	4. Percy

**A/N: **Shira Lansys fault once again! This time word count of 199 and additional prompt of _focus._

**Prompt: **45. Cooperate

**Character: **Percy Weasley

* * *

He's always been different to the others. Where they have laughter and running about and mucky hands, he has books and thoughts and whispers of a future where he can just _be._

See, in this crumbling home, with the seven-handed clock and the gnomes in the garden and _six_ other children, Percy's been lost for so long, hiding from the shouts and screams and commotion when all he wants is silence, beautiful, musical silence, where he can focus on his own mind and try to be happy. He hides away in his room and he buries his head between faded, yellowing pages, but they're always there in the background, making themselves known with shrieks and giggles.

His family.

And maybe that's what really drives them apart in the end. Percy's just too different and they're all too similar and he's always going to be just floating in this madness and trying to stay afloat.

It takes him a while to realise that, just maybe, they wouldn't drown him. They'd be the ones keeping him afloat.

And if they can't be the way he wants, and he can't be them, well, then they'll just have to learn to get along.


	5. Ginny

**A/N: **Welp. Haven't updated this in a while.

For Acid Pops in owluvr's Honeydukes Competition, in which the challenge is to write a fic about someone missing someone else.

**Character:** Ginny Weasley (HarryGinny pairing)

**Prompt:** 35. Dark

* * *

Sometimes you shove your face into your pillow so that it catches the tears you don't want to let fall. You wrap your arms tight around it and breathe deeply, imaging his scent is on the soft fabric and that the warmth you feel on your cheek is the heat of his neck and not your warm tears leaving wet spots on your pillowcase.

Sometimes you wear his t-shirt under your uniform. He doesn't know. It's an old one, much too short for him now, worn at the ends and a lot bigger than you expected it to be, but it's soft and pale, pale green and it makes you feel that little bit closer to him. You wear it under your robes like you wear his love under your skin and it's a secret. Nobody knows but you.

Sometimes you sit in the large window of your dormitory and watch the storm clouds roll in. They are dark and harsh, but you've seen darker things, harsher things in the depths of his eyes. You watch the rain fall and imagine that the droplets you see are kissing his skin for you, a replacement for all the ones you wish you could have given him, could still give him. You watch the lightening strike once and end up pulling the curtains tight and crawling into bed because it hurts too much.

But most times...

Most times you are Ginny Weasley, DA member and rebel extraordinaire. You are standing up to people with twisted tattoos who spit curses at children and you are taking beatings and curses with your lips sewn shut and you are thinking about the future and trying to remember what hope feels like.

Most times, you don't think about him.

Because, most times, that's the only way you can make it through.


End file.
